Zanzibar West

The pleasure of Stone Town is that its history is written on its buildings. The famous carved doors are the clearest example: Indian-influenced ones with brass studs and rounded arches, Omani ones with square frames and Quranic inscription, and Swahili variations on both, often on adjacent houses. Entire walking tours are built around telling them apart, and once you can, the streets stop being uniform. The other structures give you the rest of the story — the old fort built by Omani rulers on Portuguese foundations, the seafront palace complex, the tall former merchant house whose upper floors were once the tallest thing on the waterfront, and the Anglican cathedral. The layout matters too: high walls, narrow alleys and internal courtyards are a response to heat and to a merchant culture that faced inward. Coral rag is a soft building material and much of the town is in an ongoing state of repair, which is part of what makes it feel alive rather than restored. Get lost deliberately in the afternoon, take a guide for the morning, and do the two in that order rather than the reverse.

Stone Town was a major slave-trading centre in the nineteenth century, and the market site is now a memorial with the Anglican cathedral built over it — the altar is placed where the whipping post stood. The site includes preserved holding chambers beneath a neighbouring building, a memorial sculpture in the courtyard, and a small museum presenting the history with plain signage and documentary material. It is presented factually and without embellishment, which is the right decision and which visitors consistently find more affecting than any dramatisation would be. Practical notes for a visit: it takes an hour or a little more, the underground chambers are low, hot and confined and some visitors find them difficult, entry supports the site's upkeep, and it is generally quieter early. Photography is permitted in most areas but the memorial deserves the ordinary restraint of any such place. It sits within a few minutes' walk of the market and the seafront, and while it can be combined with the rest of a walking morning, most people want a pause afterwards rather than the next stop.

Inland from the town, the shamba country is where the clove economy grew — Zanzibar was for a long period the world's largest clove producer, and the plantations established under Omani rule reshaped the island's agriculture, landscape and demography permanently. What survives is a patchwork of smallholdings growing cloves alongside cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, cardamom, vanilla and a great deal of fruit. A spice farm visit is the standard half-day and is better than its slightly packaged reputation suggests: you walk the plots, crush and smell leaves and bark, watch a demonstration of how each spice is actually harvested — nutmeg and mace from the same fruit, cinnamon from the inner bark, vanilla hand-pollinated — and eat an enormous amount of fruit. Go to a working farm rather than a demonstration plot if you can, and expect to buy spices at the end, which are good and worth it. The wider Tanzanian food picture that this trade produced is in the Tanzania food guide, and the coastal half of that story starts here.

The seafront gardens hold an evening food market that is the easiest introduction to Zanzibari eating — stalls, charcoal, sugar-cane juice pressed to order. Before it, the sunset from the waterfront is the town's daily event, with dhows working across it. The beaches immediately outside the capital are pleasant rather than remarkable; the island's famous ones are on the north and east coasts and are a different trip. Practically: Stone Town is where the ferry from Dar es Salaam arrives and where the island's airport sits, so it is the natural first or last stop rather than a detour, and the transport guide covers both routes and the separate immigration desk that surprises people arriving from the mainland. Zanzibar is overwhelmingly Muslim and the old town is residential: dress covering shoulders and knees away from the beaches is expected and is simple courtesy, more so during Ramadan. One requirement catches careful travellers out — the island mandates travel insurance from its own designated national insurer for entry, and a comprehensive policy bought at home does not substitute for it.